Lafayette's Flatirons Community Church sets food drive record with 122-ton haul

Sister Carmen Community Center: Massive stockpile will get agency through summer

By John Aguilar Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
05/08/2013 06:01:04 PM MDT

Updated:
05/08/2013 06:49:03 PM MDT

Dan Greeley, the Sister Carmen Community Center s facilities and operations manager, moves pallets of donated food at the organization s warehouse in Lafayette on Wednesday. Members of Flatirons Community Church recently collected 245,000 pounds of food for Sister Carmen. (Mark Leffingwell / Daily Camera)

By the numbers

2013 Flatirons Community Church food drive:

245,072 pounds of food

235 pallets to hold it all

12 semi trucks to transport it

Flatirons' past food drives:

2012: 112,317 pounds

2011: 224,973 pounds

2010: 106,378 pounds

2009: 101,000 pounds

2008: 136,133 pounds

2007: 107,000 pounds

Total 2007-2013: 1,031,671 pounds

Source: Flatirons Community Church

Sister Carmen Community Center's food distribution:

2012: 1,177,534 pounds

2011: 1,291,285 pounds

2010: 1,298,744 pounds

2009: 1,068,882 pounds

2008: 959,764 pounds

Source: Sister Carmen

Coming Saturday

The U.S. Postal Service is holding its "Stamp Out Hunger" food drive Saturday. Collect and bag non-perishable food items and place by mailbox for letter carrier to pick up. For more information, helpstampouthunger.com .

That kind of volume is a little hard to envision until you step into Sister Carmen Community Center's spacious warehouse in Lafayette and see row after row of boxes, cans and packages under shiny plastic wrap and piled high -- mounds of food, toilet paper and basic supplies that simply weren't there as recently as two weeks ago.

"There was literally nothing in the warehouse at all," Ruth Perry, Sister Carmen's food bank manager, said Wednesday, as workers driving forklifts moved boxes around the Aspen Ridge Drive facility. "We had no soup, no chili, no canned pasta, no canned meats, we had no canned fruit. In our shopping store, we had three shelves that were completely empty."

But thousands of congregants at Lafayette's Flatirons Community Church banding together during the final weekend in April to bring in more than 122 tons of non-perishable items changed all that. The church, Colorado's largest with about 15,000 to 16,000 members, set a food drive record this year and has now delivered more than 1 million pounds of food to Sister Carmen since 2007.

Sister Carmen Executive Director Suzanne Crawford said the haul, the largest her social services agency has ever received in its nearly nine years, is enough to carry it along for the next several months. The agency distributed nearly 1.2 million pounds of food to needy residents of east Boulder County in 2012.

"Having an empty warehouse is never a good thing," Crawford said. "These months coming up are the most critical months of the year. It's when no one is thinking about food donation. Everyone is on vacation."

And kids, she said, aren't receiving free or subsidized meals at school during the summer. That's why this year, Sister Carmen and Flatirons agreed to move the annual food drive from late summer to spring.

'We can do great things'

Andy Wineman, local outreach pastor for Flatirons Community Church, said Lead Pastor Jim Burgen talked up the food drive during his sermons the previous weekend and the church showed a poignant video highlighting the struggles of a Sister Carmen client.

"He talked about food flowing through the lobby and out the doors," Wineman said of Burgen.

Heightened response this year may also be due to the fact that Flatirons is on a growth tear -- it was named the second fastest growing church in the nation by Outreach magazine last year -- and has added about 4,000 members in just the past two years. Earlier this year, the church at 355 W. South Boulder Road purchased 51,200-square-foot Lookout Mountain Community Church in Genesee for $5 million, with plans to turn the property into a second campus.

But Wineman said the drive wasn't meant to set new records. Flatirons' members, he said, were responding to a call from God to do what they could to help their neighbors.

"Flatirons, in general, is made up of a lot of broken and hurting people who can relate (to those who visit Sister Carmen's food bank)," he said. "None of us can change the world on our own, but together, we can do great things for our community."

Wineman hopes the big haul won't engender complacency in the county and deter others from continuing to support organizations like Sister Carmen. While the agency has distributed less food in the last two years since reaching a peak of nearly 1.3 million pounds in 2010, it still serves 2,400 families annually.

'We're broken people'

This is the seventh year Flatirons Community Church has held a food drive for Sister Carmen. It was started by youth at the church and it is still largely run, organized and carried out by the younger set.

Zack Weingartner, student ministry pastor at Flatirons, said the 300 teens who pitched in this year have the drive "down to a science" -- from collecting grocery bags filled with food from congregants to separating and sorting their contents onto pallets to wrapping the stockpile in packing plastic to loading them onto trucks bound for Sister Carmen.

"It blows me away," Weingartner said of the community's generosity.

He said he saw one woman in her 80s drive up to the church in a late-model vehicle and hand off a King Soopers bag filled with gift cards. Meanwhile, his own young children donated boxes of mac 'n' cheese "because it made sense to them."

"What better way to demonstrate both God's heart for people and the church's heart for people than feeding people?" Weingarten said. "We can relate to that story -- it's a me-too story. We're broken people looking to be whole, and there are a lot us because there are a lot of broken people."

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